A modern book archive geared for custom publishing

Abstract

The world of book publishing has changed drastically with the adoption of XML technologies, by imposing regular structures on authors and allowing production departments to design, alter, and redistribute books in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously. However, as we move to make our content more machine readable, we need to consider how we apply metadata in a way that supports custom publishing solutions. The author proposes a new way of looking at XML schemas for archiving books, and suggests how this may be implemented with code examples. While an archive generally preserves content as it was produced, because publishers’ archives are potential sources of revenue, they should be compiled in such a way that allows for calculated mining, supported by semantic mark-up describing not only the book function, but the intended uses.